Zeenat Nagree

Evidence between phenomenology and superstition: At the window, always at the window. The shapes move. It is the same every day. The sunlight reflects off surfaces in infinite variations, enough to make some of it visible. There are deep shadows where the rays are fragile and hardly penetrating. Every thing circulates. From a window, the observer can be distant, look at the bodies as pieces of a complex ritual enacted towards countering futility, eventual death. Yet, the pieces are falling apart, the feathers swirl in the space between objects, grazing them lightly and lifting off after contact. They are grey and white and black and blue and teal and purple and iridescent. Like oil spills and rainbows. If a feather were to softly enter the eye, its softness would absorb most of the eye’s vision, and leave fragments of visibility converging towards an opaque centre. The world would become dark and wet and blurry until the feather was pulled out, soaked and flightless. The eye would not only see then, it would start feeling, wounded and struggling for breath. The vulnerability of the eye would be thus exposed in the activation of its imperfect mechanism of ejection. Consequently, the eye’s capacity to feel would begin expanding because of its disturbed , plucked surface. The mind glitches. The window is not the window itself. It is what is left after the shutters have been opened, bolted to the side, and almost hidden. The window is this empty rectangular frame filled with the world, a viewing post. The window is all there is. From a distance, it is possible to still see all those naked bodies closely. Their folds and pores can be intimately encountered, contained in the feeling eye. Those who are tired of drawing the curtains, have given up on the idea of shame, or believe their nudity will be so brief as to be invisible, dash across and expose their contorting figures, always in a state of emergence. They are like the first bodies rising out of the river, or a chocolate bar emerging from a wrapper. A vibrating film of newness covers them, quickly disappearing after contact with light, which is to say contact with the eye. Your own body is vulnerable, if it has been seen. You wonder if they will come for it. Sometimes to protect itself, the eye detaches from the body, it floats above the body and lets the experience of each moment collide so that only a blur remains, flat, out-of-focus images, or complete darkness. The mind and the body cannot be separated, this disassociation is only possible in their intertwining. But to see wholeness, it is not enough for the eye to roll around in its socket, the body must be free to move around an object. Without the convergence of multiple perspectives, vision acquires the flatness of looking from the picture-frame of a window, or of being held down. Only looking at the sky can change the meaning of sight entirely. Its vastness envelops, and unknown objects appear. Their grey and gossamer and squiggly forms slide down the retina in a continuous loop, creating an impression of their existence. They have always been there, circulating inside you, white cells vulnerable to blue light. Old spirits that wander. The body is the site of imagination, generating thoughts around physical signals, inventing. The wounded eye sees with irritation, the sluggish tongue on tranquillisers loses language. After the body has been held down, and the immediate past recorded as a blur of colours interspersed with darkness, the eye begins skidding over surfaces as if light itself turned slippery. The mind wanders, unable to inhabit the present, its vision without coherence. A scream can then not only momentarily shut down the ability to hear but also while travelling through the body from which it is issued reach the eyes and blur sight. The body eventually collapses with the departure of the scream, deflated. Eyes vibrate. It does not take long for a monotonous landscape to turn into a bloody one. The observer at the window looks. To witness, the eye and the ear and the brain should not collide but remain in certainty. Allow the hair on the neck to.stand up while staying motionless. The embodied sight of the witness is crucial to serving blind justice. Those facts are constituted from layers of afterimages superimposed on each other, each layer overlaid with thoughts and presumptions. The witness will be called to narrate what is already transforming into ever sharper images, the perfect explanation. A camera cannot see like the eye does, it has no peripheral vision. The eye moves so smoothly that the image is imperceptibly stable despite the eyeballs’ rapid movement, whereas recorded images move with the slightest movement. Even if the eye is stable, the hand cannot be. The hand has yet to learn to see. The oldest fear of mankind is the fear of being seen. The gaze holds absolute power in this worldview. It penetrates. To be seen by the evil eye is to be touched by it. This touch of the eye manifests itself in the form of ruination. Nothing can deflect the gaze except a counter gaze itself. One eye contains another eye, arresting misdirected looking. This protective eye is represented as ceaselessly unblinking. It is placed in the middle of an outstretched palm. While holding this protective eye, the hand does not see but deflects sight. In this position, lodged at the centre of a palm, there is no rest for the protective eye. It must sweep the open landscape and its dark corners to block every evil gaze. In the absence of a protective eye, whenever the evil eye touches a body, it works like a scalpel. The surface is cut open and something vital is extracted. The body becomes listless and starts to waste away. It will no longer feel hunger, only pain that will circulate across the body in inexplicable fits and starts, a state of permanent malaise. Despite the lack of evidence of its working, the evil eye envelops. It’s touch is like that of a blanket closing around an object. The film that vibrates on the surface of a body disappears and it is consumed by the gaze. This evil eye has a mouth. It can devour any object in front of it, its gaze reconfigures the experience of the sense of touch. Philosophers have long reflected on the difficulty of naming what is touching and what is being touched. If the evil eye were to be touched back, would the body be intentionally giving up of the will to live? Is that how the body comes to experience melancholy? Melancholy is black, it absorbs all light, and oozes. We stumble around in the dark in search of meaning, to try to look. Melancholy gives the evil eye a sense of taste, the bitterness of bile. Vision blurs at the corners as the body retches, the eyes adjust to complete darkness, shapes move. You can only wait in the shivering forest to receive the dark black cubes lined in perfect symmetry. You can only move around them in the hope that they can see the specificity of your body in a state of ritual,  encircling…………………………………………….………………………………………………………………………………………………